In case of DRAMIRONY

Hello, Ohio.  I’m yours.  Yours.  Yours forever.

I really am SO Midwestern – which is boggling, if you think about it, considering I didn’t even grow up in Ohio.  Not really, anyway.  I wasn’t born there.  And I didn’t have any sense of “Ohio” when we lived in Toledo.  So my life in Columbus was really only two years long.  Aaaaaaannnndddd…they were the worst two years ever.

But Ohio is planted deep in my heart.  It’s as deep and old as the roots of my family.  And we’re still growing there, still at home in the Ohio earth, spreading and changing and becoming new with each passing year.  There’s no feeling on earth like coming around that last bend in the gravel driveway and glimpsing The Burrow through the pines.  There’s no color on earth like the oak and maple trees in spring, the cattails by the pond in the late summer.  There’s no view so pretty as the view out that big front window when the world is covered in snow. 

BUT.

The crazy thing? 

I can’t live there.

I wish I could.  I honestly wish that I could.  But I’m a writer and it seems that Ohio doesn’t want me to write when I’m there.  It’s like the worst dramatic irony ever.  DRAMIRONY!  I’ve really never written anything good in Ohio.  It dries me up and when I sit down with my computer or a pen? No words come.  For some reason…no words come.

Maybe someday they will.  That’s what I keep hoping.  Maybe after years of life in the tumultuous spiral galaxy of Los Angeles, maybe I’ll go home.  And maybe my hands or my heart will unclench and release and I won’t be plagued by writer’s block and I can sit in a rocking chair on a porch in a sweater and write write write in the richness of life in Ohio.  Maybe.

Ah, Ohio!  I’m yours!  Yours forever!

But not yet.